Google Engineers Speak Out Against NSA Surveillance, And Drop The F-Bomb While Doing So

Two
Google engineers are so outraged at the way the
NSA has tapped into Google's data to see messages flowing
between its users they've spoken out publicly, on Google+, of
course.

And they're using unusually forceful language to do it, including
the F-bomb.

Brandon
Downey, a network security engineer at Google, got the ball
rolling when he read
this article in the Washington Post. It details how the NSA
uses both legal warrants and non-warrant secret intercepts to
read Google's data. The NSA has basically broken into Google
without legal permission and is reading everything, the article
basically says. "The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually
aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American
companies," the Post reports.

The story is accompanied by a slide showing a hand-drawn diagram
of how the NSA hacked Google, on which an NSA employee has drawn
a smiley face at the covert point of entry.

I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google's
users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces.

I've seen armies of machines DOS-ing Google. I've seen worms
DOS'ing Google to find vulnerabilities in other people's
software. I've seen criminal gangs figure out malware. I've seen
spyware masquerading as toolbars so thick it breaks computers
because it interferes with the other spyware.

I've even seen oppressive governments use state sponsored hacking
to target dissidents.

But even though we suspected this was happening, it still makes
me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in
America.

I now join him in issuing a giant Fuck You to the people who made
these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no
different - GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.

We designed this system to keep criminals out . There's no
ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths
for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of
hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a
balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and
the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal
for a good reason .

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are
for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand
before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of
the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement,
we therefore do what internet engineers have always done -
build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below
is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on
understanding it, ruined.

Thank you Edward Snowden. For me personally, this is the most
interesting revelation all summer.